The Illinois Council of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (ICCAP) was established . . .

William Healy (1869-1963)

Pioneer Child Psychiatrist and Criminologist

William Healy, M.D., a pioneer psychiatrist and criminologist, established the first child guidance clinic in the United States in 1909, and was an early advocate of both the "team approach" and the "child's own story" in treatment and research. One of the founders and the first president of the American Orthopsychiatric Association, Healy helped introduce Freudian thought into the United States. Among his contributions to the field of criminology are his book The Individual Delinquent (1915) and his "multifactor theory" of delinquency, which broadened the field and moved it away from European criminology's stress on genetic factors. Healy developed an elaborate methodology for the complete study of the offender by a variety of specialists. He was also a reformer in the field of corrections, based on his investigations of several institutions for delinquents.

William Healy can be credited with bringing the interpretative framework of psychology to the juvenile justice system, with designing the institutional structure for the practice of clinical child psychiatry and psychology, and with popularizing psychological interpretations of youthful mis-conduct through his clinics, writings, and public appearances. Unlike many of his contemporaries in the early twentieth century who blamed poor heredity and mental retardation for juvenile crime and called for institutionalization, Healy argued for the intellectual and psychological normality of delinquents and made a strong case for the efficacy of psychological intervention strategies.

A physician by training, Healy began his work with delinquents in 1909 when he was employed by a group of Chicago reformers to direct the Juvenile Psychopathic Institute. These reformers, having inaugurated the juvenile court movement ten years earlier, wanted Healy to provide the new court with assessments of troublesome repeat offenders. At the same time, he was expected to use these cases to develop a general understanding of juvenile crime. Healy's results were published in 1915 as The Individual Delinquent, a compendium of social and environmental, psychological, and medical characteristics found in the youths he evaluated. Healy rejected unidimensional theories of causation, arguing instead for an eclectic approach. The task for the court and the clinic, he believed, was to determine the unique combination of factors that shaped each delinquent's individual personality. This profile could be deduced only through a thorough investigation of the delinquents and their families by a team of medical, psychological, and social-work professionals. As established by Healy, the process included efforts to elicit the child's "own story" (Healy's phrase for the psychiatrist's contribution to the evaluation).

Healy's views on delinquency as laid out in The Individual Delinquent were heavily influenced by the adolescent psychology of G. Stanley Hall, the preventive mental hygiene programs of the psychiatrist Adolph Meyer, and the environmentalism of Progressive-era reformers. Increasingly, however, Healy was drawn to explanations of human behavior found in the works of Sigmund Freud. By applying psychoanalytic concepts of repression and the unconscious, Healy came to identify "mental conflicts" as the cause of much delinquency and adolescent misconduct. Like Freud, Healy was convinced that issues related to sexualityusually caused these adolescent conflicts, and Healy's work helped to fortify the sex education movement of the 1920s and 1930s. Also like Freud, Healy located the source of personality and delinquency in family dynamics and in particular in the child's relationship with his or her mother. Healy's concurrence helped to give validity to the mother-blaming psychology that consumed child psychiatry after the 1930s.

In 1917 Healy became director of the Judge Baker Foundation of Boston, where he remained until retiring in 1947. Healy's clinic was originally designed to provide assessments of delinquents brought before the Boston juvenile court. By the 1930s the clinic evaluated and treated children from all walks of life who were experiencing a broad range of emotional or behavioral problems. In 1922, when the Commonwealth Fund, a wealthy private philanthropy interested in juvenile justice programs and research in child development, offered to support the establishment of a network of court-affiliated childguidance clinics, Healy's Judge Baker Foundation served as the working model. At first these child guidance clinics were solely for delinquents, but during the 1920s the clientele came to include other troublesome youths–in trouble at school or difficult to live with at home, for example. During the 1920s and 1930s the parents of these nondelinquent adolescents learned about the teachings of child guidance through child-rearing manuals, popular magazines, and government publications, and William Healy contributed to all these venues.

The Institute is a research, demonstration and training center housed in the Department of Psychiatry, College of Medicine, University of Illinois at Chicago. The institute has more than 40 faculty members and 65 professional staff members. IJR programs address pressing issues such as HIV risk, access to effective school services, the epidemiology of drug abuse, services for families in the child welfare system and the training of child mental health providers. The institute also offers child psychiatry clinical services and training programs in child and adolescent psychiatry, psychology and social work.